Breathing difficulties may occur from severe trauma (such as trauma that may result from a vehicular crash), medical conditions, drug reactions, smoke inhalation, etc. Professional medical emergency response personnel (for instance, paramedics, medevac crews, firefighters, etc.) are thus trained to provide breathing assistance to injured persons. The breathing assistance may include ventilation and oxygenation (with oxygenation comprising administration of oxygen-enriched gas mixtures).
The administration of the ventilation and oxygenation may involve placement of a mask over the injured person's mouth, and/or insertion of a cannula into the injured person's mouth. An oral airway device is often placed in an injured person's mouth prior to utilization of the mask and/or cannula to prevent the soft tissues of the oropharynx (i.e., the part of the throat at the back of the mouth) from collapsing into and obstructing the airway. This can be particularly important if the injured person is unconscious, or in danger of becoming unconscious.
Commercially available oral airway devices often comprise a region that rests between the top and bottom teeth, together with a region having a distal curve (i.e., the blade) to provide support along the back of the palate. The region resting between the teeth may be configured to prevent clenching of the teeth on the tongue, as well as to prevent clenching of the teeth on medical structures (such as, for example, an endotracheal tube, a suction catheter, a fiberoptic laryngoscope, etc.) which may be passed into the oropharynx while the oral airway device is in place.
A problem for medical emergency response personal (e.g., so-called “first responders”) is to find an appropriately sized oral airway device for the injured person (or to find appropriately-sized devices for more than one injured person if multiple injured persons are present at a site). If the wrong sized oral airway device is inserted into a person, it may fail to restrain soft tissues (if it is too small for a person's mouth and oropharynx), or may gag and/or choke the person (if it is too large for the person's mouth and oropharynx). Presently, medical emergency response personnel may carry a wide selection of oral airway device sizes and shapes in order to be adequately prepared for numerous different sizes of injured persons. However, stocking of a selection of different sizes of oral airway devices consumes valuable space in a tool kit. It is desired to develop improved oral airway devices that could be used for persons of different sizes, so that a single device could substitute for numerous different sizes of devices.
There has been some effort to develop adjustable oral airway devices. In theory, adjustable oral airway devices could eliminate the need for medical emergency response personnel to stock numerous different sizes of oral airway devices. However, the adjustable oral airway devices utilized by medical emergency response personnel should be suitable for rapid deployment under the stress of emergency situations, and under the awkwardness of the difficult environment conditions that may be encountered by the personnel in emergency situations. In practice, the presently available adjustable oral airway devices tend to be unsuitable for utilization by medical emergency response personnel under the adverse, and time-sensitive, conditions that may be encountered by such personnel. Accordingly, it is desired to develop improved adjustable oral airway devices.